The Road to Chicago III
by alternatives
Summary: One last stop before Chicago.


FF_1006862

Black Day in the Black Hills

Robin started to wake up. Her cheek was resting on something very solid and slightly scratchy. Also very warm. She scrunched over in the seat and slid her hand across the scratchiness, then down the curve on the other side. It was warm there too, like a seat with a heater in it. Under her cheek the solid thing rose and fell gently and she heard a subdued thumping. Like a heartbeat, she thought hazily. Then she woke up a little more and realized she was snuggled up to somebody. A man.

Her head cleared and from under her eyelashes, she looked around the interior of the van. Chris Farber in the front seat. Steve Maitland next to him. Johnnie Casanova in the opposite corner of the back seat. She relaxed. She had her head pillowed on Ham Tyler, and he was the last man to take it personally. She enacted somebody coming slowly awake. "Oh, I'm sorry. Did I cramp you?" she asked sleepily.

"Not a bit."

"I'm jealous," Casanova remarked. They had picked him up in Cheyenne along with Maitland. Then they had to boogie to get away from a local boss named Striker. Maybe the Red Dust toxin kept the evil lizards out of the snow zones, but some people certainly took up the slack. People like Coke, who tried to throw them out of Alice Penrose's squat into the snow outside Denver, and Striker who tried to make them leave Alice in Cheyenne, thinking she was Julie Parrish. "Wish some sweet thing would cuddle me like that."

"So do I," said Robin. "Then I could stop feeling sorry for you."

"Ouch," he answered.

Alice laughed, Chris grinned, and Robin sat back in her corner. "Did I miss anything?"

"Nope," Chris answered. "This has been the most boring leg of the entire trip."

"Are we picking up any more strays?" Alice asked with a chuckle in her voice.

"If we do, they'll have to ride in the back," Johnnie said. "I'm not giving up my chance for a little sugar."

"What chance?" Robin and Alice said at the same time.

"Damn, girls, give a guy a break!"

"Speaking of breaks," Maitland began.

"And trees appear," Alice said. Sure enough, on the flat north plain a sudden stand of cottonwoods made Maitland sigh with pleasure.

"You have ten minutes," Tyler said. Doors slammed, then slammed again. Tyler was in the driver's seat again. Robin pushed Maitland in ahead of her and closed the door too fast for Casanova to follow her. "Aw, man," he groused.

"You take your name too seriously," Alice said. "Shut up and take shotgun."

"No way," Chris said. "I know you have experience, Johnnie, but what you don't have is experience reading Ham's mind. Get in the middle."

"This is not what I had in mind. Come on, Maitland, switch."

"My turn to snooze," the doctor said pitilessly.

"You sound like a bunch of goddamned kids," the normally stern Tyler said, joining in the persiflage. "Get in, sit down, and shut up. We'll be at Rosebud in half an hour."

It's too buttoned-up, he thought when they did stop. Where's Sam when you want him? "Hello the house," he called.

The sound of a shotgun bolt answered him.

"Crivit," he shouted.

"You sure about that?" a voice called.

"Absolutely. Cricket was at the last stop."

"No it wasn't."

"OK, it was the last scheduled stop."

"What happened?" An elderly man emerged from the house.

"A wreck. Then some other stuff."

"Who are these people?"

"The strangers are Alice Penrose, Johnnie Casanova, and Steve Maitland."

"You're sure of that?"

Tyler looked sharply at Sam Finds-the-Horse. "As sure as I can be," he answered.

"Not as sure as I can be." Sam held out a knife.

Johnnie took it, punctured the tip of his finger and let red drops fall on the white snow. Alice followed suit. Maitland stared at them as if they were nuts.

"Problem, Maitland?" Chris asked.

He shook his head. "I just get used to how bad things are, and they get worse. Here." He bled a little and handed the knife back to Sam.

"You folks intend to spend the night?" Sam asked, herding them inside.

"No. We're behind as it is, and since we changed off drivers for a while, I have my second wind," Tyler answered.

"Hungry?"

Robin's stomach suddenly growled, and the old man grinned. "You like buffalo?" he asked.

"I never tried it," she said.

"They're starting to come back," he told them conversationally. "So are the antelope. The lizards like game that's easier to catch."

About ten minutes later they sat down to aromatic bowls of stew, some home brewed ale and flats of cornbread. When the bowls were empty, Sam half filled them again. The whole time he stayed silent, but when the last drop of broth disappeared he said, "I'm glad you're not planning to stay. We just got rid of the pilgrims and you show up."

"Pilgrims?" Johnnie was startled.

"The lizards used to come here all the time and tour the dinosaur pits. Some of them tried to come back after the Red Dust. Tried all kinds of tricks, like gas masks. Nothing worked. They haven't come back for a couple of months."

"Suits us just fine," Chris said, with a glance at Robin.

"How is Elizabeth," Sam asked her.

Robin's jaw dropped, but she said nothing.

"You've grown up," the old man said. "A year or two ago, you'd have tried to tell me I had the wrong person, and I would have known you were lying. She's well, of course, or you wouldn't be here."

"That's enough," Tyler said. "Give us half an hour to catch our breaths and we're out of here."

Nothing works out that easy around Tyler, as you know if you've kept up with his chronicles. At the seventeen-minute point, two skyfighters whooshed overhead and landed at the end of the street. Recognizing the sound, Tyler and Chris ran for the van, dragged out the weapons, and threw them to their friends. Then they grabbed explosives and prepared to make a run at the fighter.

"Stop." Sam's voice was firm as a wall and the two men stopped as if they had smacked into it.

"Mr. Horse. Who are these people?" asked the first lizard to reach them through the speaker of her hazmat suit.

"You set us up," Casanova told Sam.

"I did not. I did not know you would be here when they arrived. I thought you were spending the night somewhere else, or had gone around us to make up time."

"What are they doing here," Chris asked.

"You will see. Here it is, Ursula," said Sam, giving her a small box.

"Thank you! Here is what you wanted to know: the squad car will pass overhead about four tomorrow afternoon. But you'll need a real rocket, not just a shoulder-held because it will be about five miles up."

Sam smiled. "Don't worry."

Ursula looked at her companion, startled, then back at Sam. "You never worry. That's what worries me. You can't possibly have a rocket launcher. We'd have seen it when we got here."

Sam smiled again. "You didn't see these people, did you?"

"What?" Suddenly she peered quickly in all directions. "What people?"

"Indeed. What people?"

"You're a very strange man, Mr. Horse," Ursula said, and took her companion off with her.

"What was that?" Tyler asked.

"You heard the trill?"

"Yes."

"I learned a couple of years ago that a particular trill we use in our songs and ceremonial music has the very odd effect of disrupting the lizards' short term memory. If they hear it under the right conditions, everything they have seen or heard for the last five minutes is forgotten."

"Never makes it into long-term memory," Maitland suggested, his doctor's training keying in on the situation. "Wish more people knew about that."

"It wouldn't help them if they did. This particular trill is peculiar to our culture. I have tried to teach it to a number of people but only we Lakota can make it properly."

"Like the Tuva chants," Alice suggested.

Sam raised his eyebrows questioningly.

"In central Asia," she explained. "Nobody has come close yet to making the same sound."

"Perhaps."

"What did you give them?" Chris asked.

"We still have the formula of the antidote. She brings me information, I give her some antidote, and she can go skiing for twelve hours."

"Skiing?" Robin couldn't believe her ears.

"She became addicted to it before the Red Dust was released."

Casanova shook his head and laughed a little. "I don't know which is more incredible. That she will do anything just to get in some skiing – or that you can still make Red Dust antidote."

"Don't let it get around," Sam suggested.

"Not me, brother."

"Sam."

"Martha. Come meet – "

"They should leave. Now."

Sam bowed his head.

"You know they should. It's nerve-wracking."

Sam shot Martha a keen glance, and she nodded. "Is he hurt?"

"Is who hurt?" Maitland asked. Martha stared at him. "I'm a doctor."

"So am I," she said, and went back inside.

"Look, if somebody needs help, let me help," Maitland pleaded.

The sky lit up twice and two booms shook their eardrums. "I was afraid of that," Sam said. "They must have been under suspicion for months and now it's more than a suspicion. Please go into the house."

Tyler thought quickly. The lizards will back-track the traitors' fighters; they'll be here any minute. What I wouldn't give for one launcher and even one rocket. "You have a rocket launcher, let's launch us a rocket," he said.

"Please come in," Sam answered.

"Don't give me the inscrutable old man act," Tyler told him. "It doesn't work on me."

"I can say nothing here. Come in." Sam held the door open and led them to a room off to one side. "Meet Martha's patient," Sam said.

"Dayum," said Chris, stretching the cuss word into two syllables. Tyler tried to charge the man sitting in the dimly lit corner, but Chris laid a block on him and used all his weight to drag Tyler out of the room. "Not that I wouldn't like to see him pounded to paste, but we've got other things to do."

Tyler put his hands flat on the table in the main room and breathed deeply for a while. Chris put a hand on his shoulder, but said nothing. "We're gone," Tyler said.

"The lizards will be here any minute," Chris reminded him. "I know he sold us out, but that don't mean we can't use his rocket launcher."

"We could always strap him to the rocket," Tyler said.

"You're kidding, right?" Maitland said, coming out of the bedroom.

"No, he's not," answered Chris. "No wonder the guy's halfway around the bend. All he had to do was hear Tyler's name and he knew he was in a world of trouble."

"I thought you military guys thought he was a great man."

"He's a great man to only one man – himself.." Tyler gave one last breath and stood up. "Sam, I want that launcher," he growled.

"We only have one rocket."

Tyler showed his canines. "Of course. That's the way he does things."

"We have enough in the van for one squad car," Chris reminded Tyler.

"One."

"It will take at least two to clean out Rosebud," Sam said. "And they may need only one going back, if I judge our accuracy correctly."

"Define 'our'."

"Without you. With you," and Sam smiled; the end of that statement was obvious.

Tyler and Chris moved toward the door followed by their passengers. Then Ham turned. "Not you, Robin."

"What?"

He took her shoulders gently. "Robin, the last thing we need is for the lizards to know you're here. Sam, is there a bunker she can stay in until we finish?"

"Martha? Take our guest as well."

Maitland followed. "I'm a doctor, not a fighter," he remarked.

"The lizards won't leave the squad cars," Johnnie objected.

"What if they've reverse engineered the antidote, or found a cache of it?" Chris said. "Do you really want to bet we're going to have it easy?"

"Easy?" asked Alice.

"Sure, a shoulder launcher can take out a squad car," Chris said.

"What do you think, Tyler?" Alice asked.

"Sam, where are your vantage points? Is there somewhere we can cover for you?" Tyler asked.

"Take out the squad car after the lizards disembark, and it becomes a pitched battle. Unless they bring out a mobile phone, they're stuck."

Martha came back into the room. "He says you can have the shoulder launcher in his jeep."

Sam's eyebrows went up.

"And now you know why Ollie and I aren't best friends," Tyler remarked.

"He's apologizing?" Johnnie suggested.

"He can apologize to the unit he sandbagged in Nicaragua and fess up about whether the money for their munitions really went to Iran. I don't want to hear it." Tyler found the back door and motioned Chris to follow him.

The first squad car never made it onto the ground. Cheering came from the houses nearby when it exploded. The other two accelerated away. More cheering, but Tyler and Chris knew better and, when the skyfighters came swooping in, they were ready to bullseye them. One managed to shoot up a house at one end of the street.

Robin felt the ground shake when the house exploded. She bolted from the bunker with Martha's medical bag and ran to see if anybody needed help. There didn't seem to be anybody inside the house, even upstairs, and there was no storm cellar. She came back out before the fire got too bad, and hunkered down to watch for casualties.

A new skyfighter showed up, shooting a ring of safety around a squad car that tried to land. Although it made it onto the ground, the humans opened up with everything they had as soon as the hatch came down. It took off again, raining corpses in hazmat suits onto the snow and then closing its hatch.

The last squad car tried to come in over the fields around the town, but Johnnie tracked it and joined the residents sharp enough to see this maneuver. More lizards died and the squad car gave up. Robin ran across the street and down the back yards to see how they made out. One body lay on the snow. She turned it over. Johnnie. "Somebody help me," Robin called.

"I'll carry him," one of the locals offered.

"Thank you." They got him into Sam's house. Robin took a pulse on him and put in an IV with saline; lizard laser burns produced nasty shock and dehydration. She kept her fingers on his pulse until it steadied, then asked the guy, "Can you take a pulse?"

"Yeah."

"OK, if it gets irregular come find me." She ran back outside and hovered on the porch. Skyfighters were trying to punish Rosebud for fighting back, but automatic weapons were playing hell with the muzzles of their lasers and the external parts of their navigation equipment. One spiralled drunkenly away, crashing a few miles out of town. One came in low and Chris tattooed its front viewer with a machine gun. It pulled back. Some lizard got off a lucky shot that hit somebody on the other side of the street.

Robin ran to this casualty. The face was completely destroyed and burn marks trailed down the torso. There was no pulse, no breathing. She pulled off the jacket and put it over the face. Nobody should see that. She got back up and looked down the street.

Now she knew why it was so hard to see what was going on. It suddenly hit her that none of the street lights were on. It jarred her, city girl that she was. Is this how it's going to be from now on, she wondered? Giving up all the things that we used to think we couldn't get along without? This has got to stop. I have to find some way to help. People should not be dying or getting eaten or tortured. I don't care how much Diana wants me, I have to help. She picked up the dead person's automatic, pulled two spare magazines out of the jacket pockets, and checked to see how soon she would need them. There was one bullet left in the gun.

Robin stepped out into the street just as a skyfighter came back. It's not the broad side of a barn, she reminded herself. She smiled at Tyler's joke, then squeezed off that last round. It shed sparks along the nose of the skyfighter, and laser fire sprayed all around her, but she didn't care. Something clipped it in the stern. It veered, then crashed into the burning house. Then she heard the cheering. She looked around and saw one last skyfighter head for home. People ran up to her, clapped her on the back and threw their arms around her.

"Robin."

"I'm in trouble, right?" She knew that growl.

Tyler frowned. "Now how could a brand-new field-promoted Lieutenant be in trouble?"

She smiled in relief. "Is it over?"

"For us, at any rate."

"I need to look for more casualties." She turned to the crowd. "Did any of your buddies go down?"

"Over here." One man led the way to a fence against which somebody slumped.

Robin knelt. Then she started crying. "Alice," she whispered. She stroked the blonde curls and all the fear she had pushed aside during the battle flooded into her heart. She wiped her nose on her sleeve and cleared the tears from her face. "I need help. She shouldn't just be lying here like this."

Chris and Tyler picked Alice up and carried her behind a sort of cortege. When they had laid her on the couch in the house they were brought to, Tyler turned to Robin. "What did you mean, more casualties?"

"Johnnie. He's in Sam's house. I'd better see if he's ok. Burned. I put in saline and left somebody to keep track of his pulse. Also somebody across the street is dead. I don't know how many more yet."

"You go back to Sam's and take care of Johnnie," said Tyler. "We'll organize a search."

Rosebud was not a big town. Fifteen minutes later Tyler showed up at Sam's. "People checked in at the mayor's down the street. We got off lightly." He sat down heavily on the sofa.

"Robin, you'd better come quick," said Brad, who had been watching over Johnnie. When she bent over him, Brad said, "I tried CPR but it didn't seem to work."

Robin bent her head. A warm hand stroked her shoulder and she turned and buried herself in Tyler's arms, shaking with sobs. "It's not right, it's not right," she kept saying.

Tyler just kept stroking her back, her hair, soothing the back of her neck and slowly the sobs softened to sniffles. He got her to sit down and rocked her a little.

"I'm sorry. It just all came down on me. Mama and Ruby and Father Andrew, Daddy and Mark and Elias and everybody else all over the world and I just…"

"You've got nothing to apologize for," Tyler said softly. "You had all of that inside you and still you ran out to take care of your unit. And then you fought back. Pretty damned gutsy for a Val." Robin gave the little chuckle he was trying to get out of her. He sat her up. "Now go clean your face and get a glass of water and we'll go on from here." When she was gone he bent forward and gasped with his own brand of sadness. Girls like her shouldn't have to grow up this way. This has to stop. I've got to make it stop.

"You OK?" Chris asked.

"Sure."

"What happened?"

"What always happens when a kid like Robin faces too much in one day. She'll be all right."

"Yeah, she's got guts. Never thought I'd hear myself say that, but it's true." He gave Tyler a look and got back the tight grin he expected.

"Let's close this down and hit the road."

Maitland was behind the wheel when they got to the van. "I'll drive. You must be exhausted, but I sat this out. No more. I see what you mean about North."

Tyler nodded, helped Robin in and got wearily into the shotgun seat. "Take us to Chicago," he said.

The World Liberation Front quarters in Chicago actually had a working revolving door. It stopped the team short. Where was security? Then they all realized they were used to LA security. Here in the north, you could still have revolving doors on the ground floor – as long as you had rockets on the roof. They checked in at the front desk and Tyler asked for Maggie Blodgett. "She's in family housing on the third floor," the woman said. "Three fifteen." She gave Robin a key on Tyler's say-so.

When they knocked, Polly Maxwell opened the door. Lots of crying happened, and Katie jumped up and down as if she were six, instead of a grownup ten-year-old. "You stay here," Tyler said. "I'll find Maggie and give her a heads up." Robin was right behind him at the door and he gave her a questioning look. She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him. At first he was tempted to ask if a lieutenant should behave like that, but then he realized he had just been adopted into the family. He hugged Robin back.

Robin kissed his cheek. "Take care of yourself. I want to see you again someday."

Ham dropped a kiss on top of her head, then hugged the other two girls goodbye. Once downstairs, he asked the desk clerk if she knew where he should start looking.

"It won't be that hard," she said. "Maggie went out about an hour ago, she's having dinner at Everest. It's in the old Stock Exchange building."

When Tyler walked through the restaurant entrance he first thought, little Maggie, happy at last. If her guy can afford to bring her here, he's doing pretty good for himself. Hope he's worthy of her. Then he saw Maggie at one of the premiere tables and knew he was right. Suddenly the guy she was with went for a full-body hold that would have done Gorgeous George proud. Her eyes met his and her face glazed over with chagrin. If I go over there, it'll embarrass her no matter what I say, Tyler thought. He backed off and asked the maitre d' if he could leave a note. Then he wrote the bare basics down, signed it and left.

Next he stopped in the WLF office. Chris was already there sending out messages. "I drew Topeka, then Stone Mountain," he said. "You?"

"Haven't checked yet. Robin's all squared away." Maitland passed the door. "Maitland!"

"Hi. Listen, if there are any hard feelings left, you can sock me too. Just do it on the other side. I want the bruises to match."

Tyler grinned and held out his hand. "Where are you going?"

"Time for me to stop sitting on the sidelines, like I said," answered Maitland. "And they seem to have something that's right up my alley, but it means going to LA."

"If you see Julie, say hi for me. That'll be enough. She'll already know that Robin is safe."

Maitland never got to deliver that message. When he saw Julie next, they were both aboard Diana's mothership and even pronouncing Tyler's name could be fatal. But that's not the end of the story….

18


End file.
